Alternative American: review of Ed Tato (01)

A grand matriarch who rules with a mean stink-eye and a quick mop handle, a crazy old man who's buries a railroad spike in his yard every week for his fifty-three years, a smooth, shark-skinned Lothario whose life is meticulously arranged by "houndstooth, tweed and gabardine," a wandering hipster-hobo-bard that drifts in and out of the family: These are just some of the members of the Del Gabbo clan.

Set in Niagara Falls, NY Ed Tato's latest collection of poems, True Stories from la Cosa Nostra (Unholy Day Press) tells a loosely woven story that spans thirty years and winds through thirteen family members. The term "la Cosa Nostra", long-associated with the mafia literally translates as "this thing of ours." A cultural reference to the family as close-nit, extended clan.

Like William Kennedy's Phelans or Puzo's Corleone (though slightly more comic and benign), Tato has given us an all-American immigrant family in the throws of cultural assimilation. The Del Gabbos come complete with family tree, an intricate mythos and the obligatory rainbow variety of dysfunctions. It might be an overly bold statement, but never has a book of poetry, except perhaps for Master's "Spoon River Anthology" been so ripe for translation to the screen.

It has been proposed that sometimes the proper criticism of art is cross disciplinary - where the most insightful praise for a movie may be to wonder what kind of poem it would make, or what kind of painting a song would make, etc. Whether or not this is appropriate praise, it is at least testimony to Tato's yarn-spinning that half way through the book one wants to begin casting calls.

One of the guilty pleasures of True Stories is the charming, inviting and intriguing qualities of these stories. Despite the conflict, the dysfunction, the final, tragic disappointment with the family (the idea of family); one still can't help wanting to join the Del Gabbos, to dodge a backhand at Sunday dinner, to go to the tracks with Aldo, to lob rotten pares at priests with Umberto, to sit on the front porch with the men, smoking cigarettes and drinking homemade wine, to listen in on what the women are saying in some other part of the house.

One of the more glaring aspects of the majority of Tato's generation of poets (and going as far back to the academy's retaking of the spotlight from the beats in the early '70's) is its near-absolute aversion to raw humor, horror, tragedy, adventure, intrigue; in short, to the idea that art must first engage and entertain before it can enlighten. The back-side blurbs of modern poetry collections are useless to the casual (though committed) reader and are usually inaccurate, inane and inflated as a museum placard. Maybe this is so because the average collection of poems by today's gentleman-scholar-poets is never really, truly lyrical or visceral or titillating or knee-slappingly hilarious.

Modern poets seem to consider the impulse to excite and ensnare the reader base, even when used decisively, sparingly, tastefully. Tato, however, manages to weave the highbrow and the lowbrow seamlessly, and with a modernist finesse to boot. His rhythmic style is wry, blunt and staccato, a Spartan feather-weight, all bone, muscle and tendon, still fresh into the twelfth round. In "Pico Represo" his rapid-fire tragi-comedy effortlessly blends the heartbreaking with the ludicrous:

"I weighed slightly more
than the submarine sandwich
I brought with me at birth.

It was pastrami From Avenue Subs on Elmwood,
And prompted my Uncle Aldo
To nickname me the little Jewboy."

From "Uncle Aldo"…

"one night, Uncle Aldo left his fedora at the bar,
when he went to get it,
a milk truck clipped him plunging a rib into his lung.

As the doctors scrubbed for surgery,
Uncle Aldo asked about the hat
And the daily double at Buffalo Raceway."

These poems are not finely spun glass. This is not a dusty collection of bloodless porcelain dolls. This is not a set of expensive decorative hand-towels. This is poetry with pathos and idiom, poetry with a distinct personality and a common healthy funk to it. Tato shows us that poetry should bray a little, that poetry should strut and talk a little shit from time to time, that poetry should throw off a little of the human heat and sweaty stink that lives somewhere between finishing off a twelve hour day in the sun with your buddies and fucking your lover stupid on a Sunday morning.

Ultimately, what Tato has done with True Stories is to began with a collection of memoirs, notes-to-self, obituaries, family photos and secret family recipes, and work backward, whittling away the flab. Instead of building up the bulk, he leaves us with lean, stripped-down poems that wink and tell you exactly what a semi-reluctant member of a family thinks you need to know.